How DTC boosted organic traffic and search position for an international corporation

46% increase in organic traffic

143 backlinks

80% increase in Google positions 1 to 3

Success Story

DTC + ThermoSoft

ThermoSoft is an international corporation specializing in electric radiant in-floor heating systems.The objective for this outreach content campaign was to build top-tier links with high domain authority to ThermoSoft.com. By earning mentions and link placements on a variety of media sites, we could effectively increase keyword rankings for the client’s most targeted search terms.The campaign had a $10,000 budget, split between research, content production and media outreach.

A 46% increase in organic site traffic

Target Audience

We began by establishing a core group of topics tangentially related to our client’s area of expertise, heated flooring. Among the concepts we gravitated towards were “luxury” and “lifestyle.”We know from experience that consumer behavior and lifestyle analyses are widely covered in local and national media. We also know proprietary data is highly coveted by journalists everywhere. So, we set out to conduct a study of the relationships between everyday Americans and the most familiar trappings and luxuries they encounter in our modern world.We had seen this subject covered before but often rather lightly. There are dozens of iterations of “10 Things You Can’t Live Without” floating around on various media sites. What we hadn’t seen, though, was a data-based analysis of how people feel about certain luxuries relative to other luxuries. For example, there’s Spotify and there’s Netflix… if forced to choose, which would you cut first?

We conducted our survey on what has become a tried-and-true platform for our work, the Amazon-powered task engine known as Mechanical Turk. Over the course of two weeks we surveyed 1,000 Americans, asking them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10, how essential a given luxury is in their life.Using averages of the responses and cost details, we were able to rank our entire list of luxuries and conclude what Americans find most and least essential.The real joy of this was uncovering some of the hysterical and poignant realities in the data, like that people value their WiFi over pets, their dryer over domestic travel, Spotify over live concerts and Amazon Prime over professional haircuts!

Results

Links and PlacementsFrom August 11, 2017 to October 17, 2017, we earned 143 total links from 25 hours of media outreach and promotion.Seventeen percent of the placements were from sites with a domain authority of 80 or higher and 86% of the placements were from sites with a domain authority of 50 or higher.Examples of top linking sites include USA Today (domain authority 96), CNBC (95), Entrepreneur (93), and Inc. (91). This content was also syndicated on the Gannett news network.Equivalent Ad Spend and ROIThe total aggregate readership for this campaign was 59,751,190 and the total ad equivalency for this campaign was $112,331. (This is calculated using the readership, potential viewership and average ad cost of each placement. It represents how much the editorial coverage would cost as placed as advertisements.) The piece was also shared 3,644 times on social media.Based on ad equivalency alone, the return on investment for this campaign is 1,023%.Keyword SuccessAll tracked related keywords showed tremendous upward movement in organic search results.At the campaign onset, 95 keywords ranked in positions 1 to 3 on the first page of Google results. As of January (most recent available data), 171 keywords ranked in positions 1 to 3 – an 80% increase to the most valuable search engine ranking positions.The campaign also performed well for positions 4 to 10 (the first page of Google search results). To start, 176 keywords ranked in positions 4 to 10, and as of January 321 ranked – an 82% increase.This increased visibility also increased organic traffic to the site by 46%, driving more leads and sales to ThermoSoft.